Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may not have been the first play to parody amateur theater, but his depiction of the exceptionally incompetent Mechanicals certainly created the mold for more modern-day, like-minded British comedies like Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong. Christopher Guest’s now-iconic Waiting for Guffman – a mockumentary about the aspirations of an overly enthusiastic but woefully untalented amateur acting troupe – perfected the practice of using community theater as a punching bag on this side of the pond.
The thing is, American amateur theater has been an important, passionate grassroots enterprise since Colonial and Revolutionary War times. The oldest continuously producing amateur company in New England is Jamaica Plain’s Footlight Club, which was founded in Massachusetts in 1877. What is now known as “community theater” sprang up during The Little Theater Movement between 1912 and 1925, as small, volunteer-based theater groups emerged across the United States and produced plays with a strong emphasis on community engagement rather than commercial success. These early troupes performed in found spaces such as churches, halls, or stables and operated with small budgets, limited production values, and short runs. Most contemporary playhouses still do. Today, according to the American Association of Community Theaters, there are more community theaters (over 6,000 across the United States and its territories), involving more participants (over 1.5 million volunteers), presenting more performances of more productions (over 46,000 productions per year), and playing to more people (over 86 million annually) than any other performing art in the country.
In Rhode Island, a robust community theater scene includes approximately 60 troupes. Each operates independently and each has an interesting story to tell, including The Granite Theater in Westerly. Sitting upon the highest point in downtown Westerly is a handsomely restored Greek Revival Church built in the 1840s. The building was home to the Broad Street Christian Church and, until recently, also hosted The Colonial Theatre troupe – a professional company that still offers free outdoor Shakespeare on summer evenings in historic Wilcox Park. In 2000, the church doors opened as The Granite Theatre, a 140-seat community theater offering a year-round, seven-show line-up.
Change came in 2023, when the 11-member board hired Nicole DiMattei as the theater’s artistic director. A recent transplant from New York City, DiMattei had performed, produced, directed, choreographed, and written professional for-profit theatrical productions – much of it Off-Broadway – for the better part of 20 years. “In no time,” noted The Westerly Sun’s arts & culture critic Nancy Burns-Fusaro, “she enchanted the community.” DiMattei’s tenure started with the season of shows she inherited from the previous administration. Included was Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door, a comedy about the lives of four men with neurodiversity who live in a group home in Boston. The play was written in 1986 and has since been called out for its outdated understanding of these characters’ conditions and its now-inappropriate use of language to reference them.
In her program notes, DiMattei explained her directorial approach to this work: “I wanted to make sure we took every precaution to tell this story in a way that moved us forward in how we talk about this intricate subject [and] for all of us at the Granite Theatre to take at least one step in the right direction.” This included having cast, crew, and front-of-house staff comprised of neurodivergent and neurotypical persons. And it did not take long for her to bring a greater degree of professionalism to the audition and rehearsal process, which has increased the number of quality local performers coming out for shows. A more eclectic upcoming season of shows is in the offering as well, including The Full Monty (March 7 – 16), The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (April 4 – 13), and The Laramie Project (May 2 – 11). Says Rona Mann, a theater critic and radio show host on WBLQ in Westerly, “There has always been something about that word ‘community’ before ‘theater’ that connotes less-than. Nothing can be further from the truth.” •
This article is the first in a series that will profile local community theaters. Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who also writes for The Boston Globe. Connect with him on Facebook.
